Established Marvel : a Monk by Abbreviation

171. AND ALL THIS TOO (nyc, 1st street, 1968)...

Five days around the clock and a true Mysterion arrives holding in his ciphered hands the rings of Saturn and all that go with it - elopements of frenetic dupes scavengers of toil and tale and the harbingers of yesteryear's return (the scolded saddle-boots the Hoppalong Cassidy shortstop the bullet-ridden target-practice brain of Enid P. Falk) and he opens his valise and fire rises out of it - soot and black smoke scalding reality but leaving his face intact (marked marked I say like the very Devil would be) - and a few minutes later I'm standing by the stove in an unheated apartment wishing I was not alone but with a fireside crowd instead ('we're cold here all the time there's never any real heat the stove costs a fortune but we never pay the bill and no matter they never turn it off') and the girl nearby with a six-month old baby is holding her hand over the baby girl's face and I ask her why and she says 'to keep the warm air closer to her?' and down below on the street a patrol car slides by slowly with a spotlight tracing the upper windows of a nearby building - someone had thrown an incendiary bomb into the shattered window on the fourth floor and a small fire had started and the police are still marauding around looking for clues - but now it's nightfall and no one any longer cares who sees what and they know they don't have to hide (why is it I wonder that cities are taken over at night by each element that hides from it during the day?) - by morning as usual there will be a corpse or two to clean up and a few beatings to investigate along with five or six people hospitalized and one or two just clinging to life but it's always like that and because of that it brings out the Bible salesmen - the thumpers pushing some meaningless Old Testament blues down the throats of every rabid Goy or Hebrew they can find : say it once or a hundred times and it all works out the same : myriad rosebushes growing on graves lame lankies leaning on Lincolns and the entire westside of old Jersey City falling over on itself in a drunken Slovak stupor - the cows and the cats shall rest together assured of one thing : just like the major powers on the international scene = Mutual Assured Destruction or (MAD) for short (and no I kid you not).
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I watched the tall woman as she took off her clothes - it was an incredible sight - and all I had to do was sit on this big old armchair in its spot by the window and watch window to window across the alley from 1st Street to the next and her open uncurtained window was lit well enough for any passing parade to watch - of course not from the street because craning one's neck would break one's back but here - neighbor-to-neighbor as it were - it became a simply nicety a social courtesy a neighborly thing to be sure and the guy whose apartment this was (I sometimes cleaned it) had told me all about it and damned to be sure if he wasn't right ! and what a sight.
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But no matter - this lower east side was much bigger than that and this small scene would only make one gag when seen broadly in the much larger scheme of things all around.

170. HOW I ONCE MARVELLED AT THE MANIFESTATIONS OF ALL THINGS IN ONE PLACE:

There is another waning moon over my right shoulder in the early morning darkness - nothing like the sun has come up yet and the sky grows only slowly light and thus it has ever been : some Devil entrapment lurks 'round every corner and the yellow lights of weakening lanterns throw strange forms across the glass and every window I see is partially shaded by something I'm not sure of - amidst all the things for sale from yesterday and all the shoes and coats and hats and cameras of another commerce are figments of another imagining - one of magnificent deals and bargains to be made beyond the reckoning of these feeble cash transactions and it is only when I STOP to determine what follows me that I realize it is nothing nothing at all and the indeterminate nature of my time and place reciprocates and calls me back by names I will not reckon to : insignificant wretch foolish cipher and the rest : were I to actually listen I'd surely go mad but as it is I'm deaf to the soundings of any Lucifer or Luther too for that matter and MY theses posted on any doorway would be addressed to the Devil I see more than the Devil I don't see : 'you are miserable too you pathetic little worm' and then I'd list a million things of issue and consternation - how the world is really flat as planar consciousness itself and only time enfolds back upon time over and over how the light we see is but a tangible manifestation of that which first conceived it and how all of this taken together can be used by our working minds (either as one or individually) to compose the world we walk through : and I am the braying of the wolf on the flat frozen night I am the mariner heading back to shore I am the dead boy holding the candle he is to be buried with who first gets up again arises and turns to the mourners and says this : 'do not look back at me do not seek me out with reluctance for I am the testament to what you will not admit - that all life is current and steady and processed together and that even as the dead co-mingle souls so the living too must provide for themselves and each other at one turn and without further knowledge you should say back to me 'you have proven the case for faith' even though I have not (for it is all a figment of sorry times and a nostalgia for an old Paradise mixed with the keening of all the past') -- and then JUST LIKE THAT there is no more.

169. THE REVOLUTION'S IN THE SQUARE (a life of contemplation):

I may have misunderstood everything I may have not heard a thing I may have not been present when I thought I was but nothing mattered nor made any sense anyway SO I stumbled forward talking to myself along the shrouded streets of whichever place it was my feet had taken me (I certainly wasn't touring in Turin whose SHROUD was enduring) - peripatetic shameless and grave with some hunger thrown in for spite and the girls that I saw were too rich for me and they looked askance at the chance (as I could tell) to see and the word on the street was 'John done said don't ask about the bell - it's ringing for me' but actually it was (incorrectly stated) wrong as I heard it because street people can get nothing right except death and hunger and it actually was John Donne who said 'ask not for whom the bell tolls - it tolls for thee' and that was after something like 'NO MAN is an island' and I remember ON THE other hand that each man is a separate Monad 'particle-piece-of-something-greater-while-being-alone' at least and some or another dead President took that cudgel too and ran with it 'ask not what' instead of ask not for whom BUT WHAT'S the DIFFERENCE once you're out of the womb and I'm covered in some religious philosophy and a fight for the ages - untold endless myopic and outrageous - goes on around me while at the corner of Broadway some cat is singing the blues in a tin-penny hat with a wandering eye and three strings on a guitar made of water and he's scat-singing to beat the band 'cept there ain't none and the people passing throw back something whether dollars nickels pennies or looks I cannot tell and the old soldier fellow with his yellow-tweed-ostrich coat kneels to pray at the church by the corner and he never gets up again - seeing the ghost of Charles Chaplin and the blind girl too at that water-trough where the church makes the corner bend with a graceful adieu and I go on and look back - headed south somewhere for something but music's the curse of the streets and I hear everything I don't wish to hear and see only the best - Fallen Angels along the top of the mortar and five winnowing windows made of glass and college kids stumble drunk as all fish walking backwards to the front of the end of all time and I'm spinning with the world and all along in rhyme I keel over forward and get back up - rotating nothing in this hillock of my crime - 'The Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres' I seem to remember something as I get back up was published in Nuremberg announcing that the Earth revolved around the Sun - a dense technical treatise it was - there is a certain strange unity unearthed (no pun) in this work - in that 'if we uncenter ourselves in obedience to the compelling circles and angles of 'Revolutions' we'll come to see that the eccentric radius of any planet equals its relative mean distance from the Sun while the epicycle radius corresponds to Earth's relative mean distance from the same point' : never mind the fact that (and never mind my crazy mind remembering this stuff in a situation like this) Ptolemy's eccentric radii for all four planets and the Sun equal 60 units while the epicyclic radii vary; this is simply an artifact of observations taken from a moving Earth rather than a relatively motionless Sun' but the important fact is the ratio itself : for Mars the ratio is 60 divided by 39 and a half or 1.518 which is a number which differs by less than 1 percent from the currently calculated mean Martian distance from the Sun of 1.524 astronomical units and Copernicus privately circulated a brief outline of his heliocentric idea in 1513 he silenced himself on the subject as he struggled to construct a full explanation - and I can go from that in 1513 to more than a hundred years later to 1676 or so when the back and forth of THAT day was between Spinoza and Leibniz - equally forceful and interesting and just as current to me - [I'm thinking current while leaning on a pole - I'm thinking Pole while throwing in Copernicus] the two of these men were so different - characterized as opposites as in the dealings of 'a crooked and ungainly philosopher the bewigged Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz with a beauteous contemporary with dark languid eyes the Portuguese-Dutch-Jewish thinker Baruch de Spinoza' creating the foundations of modern philosophy and Spinoza postulated a universe ruled only by the cause and effect of natural laws without purpose or design the God of which universe was a non-interventionist whose essence and pervasiveness might be best described as Nature with a capital N in what Camille Paglia too would call the 'chthonic' sense and given God's non-interventionist policy Spinoza believed the modern state had the responsibility of looking after the common man and the common man had the responsibility of looking after himself and in all of this Spinoza saw 'FREEDOM' and anticipated later philosophical and scientific developments (when Einstein was asked if he believed in God he replies 'I believe in Spinoza's God') - and in Spinoza'a time the question actually was if you believed in Spinoza's God then were you not in actuality an atheist ? an offense then punishable by exile imprisonment or death ? Leibniz thought so and others agreed - such as the bishop who denounced Spinoza as 'that insane and evil man who deserves to be covered with chains and whipped with a rod' and the Jewish community in Amsterdam - which excommunicated him but the mystery is whether or not Leibniz himself believed in Spinoza's God - cribbed his teachings (while professing unfamiliarity with them) and cynically invented his own philosophy in reaction to Spinoza's so as to mask his secret atheism (why ? from an impulse for self-protectionism and the patronizing view that the 'masses' needed to be protected from the rudderless world he detected all around them) - Leibniz was prolific and did make advances in mathematics and had a great role in developing calculus - all of which overlapped with his British contemporary Isaac Newton but apparently much of Leibniz's thought is in debt to Spinoza's : Spinoza believed man's soul and body were inextricably tied and progressed in tandem through the world subject to natural laws BUT Leibniz was disturbed by the conclusion that followed from that belief - that the soul died with the body and he wished to show that the soul and the body were separate in order to make it easier to prove that the soul was immortal and in the service of this obsession Leibniz came up with the notion that everything and everyone in the world was a distinct 'monad' (from the Greek word for unity) programmed by God to act in a certain way and each body monad was accompanied by a soul monad that coincidentally shared the same experiences and GOD was a monad too Leibniz argued and for those who wanted to see God pre-eminent Leibniz explained that God was the 'Monad of monads' and I tried considering this as something to hold close and understand but at the same time I wondered what cage this was coming from - the God cage the Monad cage the cage of opportune wordplay or whatever and if today's modern people knew anything about this I was willing to bet they didn't understand nor consider it one whit anyway and I thought of myself 'Mr. Monad' I wanted to say - myself leaning on a lamppost under the Eighth Street lights by the old Hoffman Studios where the record store was blasting British music by Blind Faith (talk of a coincidence) and the old industrial workers Local 65 or whatever it was had the trucks rolling in and the corner pastry shop made me hungry about nothing and the new people in the new apartment building made me wonder what the HELL they'd torn down to put that there - and all of that had me considering what the heck was I anyway and all this modern people crap - 'anxious over the apparent purposelessness of the world revealed by modern science' - is supposed to be replaced by some great new transcendent age of people struggling to protect their 'belief in a transcendent power and force more lasting than their material world' and yeah right sure I muttered while spitting and under the lamppost I wanted to stay because I knew no modern God was gonna' enter there - material bullshit possessions and means be damned they all misunderstand the sunlight to begin with and it all gets worse from there each minute of the live-long day and Spinoza's God might have been enough for Einstein but that's about it for today nobody cares a whit and anyway it doesn't matter when the hordes are at the doors with ready cash in hand and Spinoza's God still spinning makes 'no exception to its natural laws on your account oh people and it will work no miracles for you oh people of the plains and it will tender no affection oh those people who strive and utter and cry and beg and it will show NO CONCERN for your well-being oh campers and disciplinarians and those who bow and those who hold candles and move about hushed in dark places awaiting light beneath rose windows shattered by rocks and pebbles and bombs and steel NOTHING is for you and NOTHING is real and THIS GOD I say to you will give you NOTHING that you do not already have for God helps those who help themselves!' and with that I bent over and laughed upon the ground and found my Self once again deprived of all company except the ghost of what I was once and could have been once more and should have been and was not and all possibilities like some endless paper hallway with a watermark of time and energy too seemed stopped and stuck by the TIME it got to me and whosoever believes in God needs a capital G and not much else or so it seemed at that moment FIXATED by gain and loss the awkwardness of the tall buildings squeezing out the old horse stables the paths where the wagons went and the gaslight-fronted drinking halls where ancient artists came back to life and talked back to the world and I assumed their pose and I assumed their life and all of their beliefs and it all went out from me AT ONCE commingled with dread and fear and lightning and more - and OH! by the way Copernicus it was who wrote 'Mathematics is written for mathematicians' and I figured fair enough and left it all for them - yet this philosophy I've written for regular people and I swear I heard that echo in the rafters : sky above and heaven above that and somewhere above even that the Heaven we claim as home (but why I'll never know).

168. KNOCKED UP AND PUNCHED OUT TOGETHER (Heartbreak & Wonderment) - nyc, 1965:

Heartbreak and wonderment are both the same thing - you lose a million feelings and you get them back again : but it wasn't like not trying : third-floor rooms and hardwood floors pasted thick with spilled Gesso while people passed along the boards one way in and another way out already half-famous or sick at least to be on their way somewhere - Nigerian drummers and folk-singer trios the madmen of the glen and fake cowboys dripping with lust and everybody trying hard to stay drunk on red wine and speak only the deepest most profound couplets they could think of and the 'theory' was (I'd heard it said) to just spew and spew and put as much out there as possible no matter either way if it made any sense at all but just get it out there so it could get 'covered' - interviews talk records gossip and all the rest - and then (if you 'hit' - which meant 'fame') you could 'make up the rest later' any reasons for it or meanings you might be asked about : they all wanted fame and fortune and probably all got it with the plumed-serpent fakery of a hundred different bodies : Bobbie Zimmerman the Jew-boy hobo rebel Mary Travers the hand-picked fair-haired unreal blond-baby American Herbert Kaury Tiny Tim Phil Ochs Lenny Bruce Lenny Cohen and probably much later Lenny Kravitz too - feeble warriors in the enfranchisement of false reality and I saw them all squandering time and pickling people ANYBODY later useful they kept 'em in brine - preserve the chance for any opportunity until the big-time comes and I saw them all loitering as it were in whichever late loft would have them - jazz guys paint artists sculptors the indigent piano players with forty-five fingers and the rest with rent parties wine parties drug-addled music blasts lasting 3 days and 3 nights too with people and taxis all coming and going and bicycle girls arriving fashionably late from whatever chunky fashion shoot they'd just finished the Warhol buzz the Happening crowds the patty-cake monsters from Tompkins Square Park and the klieg-light faggots and the Off-Broadway stars every and all the very same bastardized butt-fucking meglomaniacal crowd of somebodies from nowhere or nobodies from somewhere or something like that : we scrambled thirty eggs one morning thrown into a pail and stirred over an outdoor fire at a backyard-pit behind a loft - just kept it swirling with milk and it all came too bland pureed like paint but people ate it anyway chunky or not and no one cared and 'He Who' (their name for Bob Dylan) was puking in the back weeds in his old suede jacket YET AGAIN and this was before Blonde on Blonde when very little mattered and the pukefest jacket by then had become ALREADY very famous more famous than HIM and I saw Michael Olatunji one morning riding a bicycle down the stairs until he fell off and the entire thing went sailing amidst his drumming peals of laughter : it was about that time that the incredulity of it all finally hit me and I realized I could say and do anything I wanted to too and if I covered it well enough no one would doubt - it was all that fantastically simple and perverse and I talked to anybody who talked Joe Pine to the Milky Way to David Susskind and they ALL were looking for 'heads what could yap' and anyone would do - some Joni Mitchell type to Marchand Donaroo and there were so many legends back then in that day that I lost count without even trying (but hey - the eggs were OK).

167. BOB DYLAN AND THE REFUGEE TRAIN (nyc, 1963):

It wasn't the most God-awful thing to have to be without when it's like that : without food without money without reasons and without prospects or resources and I've written about this a hundred times at least but it is surprising how one can survive both within bounds and within personal precepts of philosophy and limits if you so choose : I took very many long walks through Chelsea and the London Mews area or whatever that was called just to pass long mornings - surviving on a long cup of coffee or a ten cent bowl of oatmeal one or both and the stories I found there were great and legion - the old family sagas of twisted Irish criminals and the wayward mis-steps of little kids growing up into teen-age hoodlums and then career criminals and the dock-hands who stole everything they touched and the others who beat and killed for money - they all had family homes and family rooms to go to and there were regular meals served on table-top at their little apartments whether 10th Street 17th Street or any other named street - it all fell into place better for them in that way only because they really were born somewhere of note - a real 'place' on the local streets to call their own - by contrast I was an inveterate newcomer blown in on some refugee train from the dank swampy wilds of some back-ass New Jersey swamp infested with cheap development bad housing and isolated folk and THAT was what I had to live with - try and avoid it all I might and it ill-served me too to try and sit through any time in Manhattan with such small and parochial suburban attitudes which all that brought in - it just wouldn't work and I knew it and like any of those kids who came into NY to break through onto Broadway or some mighty acting career for stage and hopefully screen it all came down to application and energy - but I had none of that intense stupidity that so many put into the stage-fakery and queer sexuality of the theater and arts crowd - most of it sank to the bottom anyway and then came out through the ass-end of the fledgling porno industry anyway (all those failed and newcoming actors and actresses jerking off for the big money-shot and its payday whenever they could) and for the one percent for whom any of this Great White Way stuff worked for them it was good while for the others it usually ended up with disease disappointment and distemper - no matter for we all turn out to BE something anyway - and if we don't 'telegraph' who we are and where we're from - if we don't BEAR (or bare) the telltale signs - then maybe just maybe we can get away with it all like some cockamamie folksinger pretending he's from the circus or something when all ever was was a cheesy north-country Jewboy from the far side of his own fantasyland and if 'times weren't always a'changin' then I don't know what history was EVER about and none of that's so different after all than what any of us do or would do I suppose in those same situations - but anyway I didn't I stayed straight with myself and quiet with others : led around by dreams and fortitude I stayed alive on the hoof while coming through for each cattle-call no matter and I ran around from any pillar to any post when I had to or when I felt I should - upper east-side sitting rooms in very expensive family situations where jewelry and drugs were equally traded or broken down Grand Street tenements staggering between broken glass and airshafts while kids shot up in the stairwells and mothers and fathers threw knives at each other inside the kitchen-walled pantry : a bizarre world at once sublime and so dismal that even rats and mice weren't sure which way to run and I learned what money was and what it meant to those who HAD it or to those who WANTED it - but mostly to those who had NONE of it - so I ate for free when I could or bought twenty-cent muffins at other times and I certainly didn't grow fat but didn't die a thin-man's death either.